Recently, interest has been shown in use of voice interfaces for computing devices. In particular, voice interfaces are becoming more common for devices often used in “eyes-busy” and/or “hands-busy” environments, such as smart phones or devices associated with vehicles. In many scenarios, devices in eyes-busy and/or hands-busy environments are asked to perform repetitive tasks, such as, but not limited to, searching the Internet, looking up addresses, and purchasing goods or services.
An example voice interface includes a speech-to-text system (or text-to-speech (TTS) system) that converts normal language into speech (or text into speech). Other systems are available that may render symbolic linguistic representations like phonetic transcriptions into speech to facilitate voice interfacing. Speech synthesis is artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware.